


the show must go on

by youremyqueen



Category: Death Note
Genre: Animal Death, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Fic Exchange, Gift Fic, M/M, POV Male Character, POV Third Person, Pre-Canon, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 20:44:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>B has performance anxiety and A rejects the role altogether, or: <i>love is watching someone die.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the show must go on

**Author's Note:**

> **prompt was:** _Near the time of A’s suicide. B contemplates, while watching A’s death date come nearer, if things could have turned out differently. He watches the life and ambition ebb away from the successor’s eyes and realizes it will never, ever return._
> 
> this may be one of the saddest things i've ever written, and also one of the funnest. i really enjoyed exploring A as a character and A/B as a ship, because it's something i've never really been interested in before and now i have about 150% more feelings about them. the B characterization here is vastly different from my usual and (because you specified no L/B) the whole pre-canon wammy's situation ended up being really not how i usually write it. hopefully i didn't go too far off-prompt? happy late holidays, i really hope you enjoy it!

The problem is putting something back together once you've torn it apart. 

For A it's easy. All the gears fit neatly, metal bits and bobs aligning with effortless precision, and he snaps the case back on in under ten minutes and tightens the screws with giddy, freckled hands. B stares down at his mess of rubble, the bent clock-face and the peeling little roman numerals, and it isn't _fair_.

He says, "This isn't fair."

A grins at his lap because anything more will end with them tussling in the garden after lesson, teeth knocking shins knocking knobby little elbows, but B can taste his hard won superiority from across the room and it bitters his tongue.

"And that," Roger says, "is why you should listen more carefully to my instructions."

B is ten years old, and he is frowning, and he really doesn't think that's the issue here.

Instruction number one had been to dismantle the respective watches placed before them. He'd listened, he'd heard, he'd understood. He'd smashed his onto the floor and stomped on it with his Wellington boots. A had calmly unscrewed the glass pane and painstakingly disassembled every minuscule piece, laying them all out in neat little rows on the desk before him. When the order had come to put it all back together again, B had been stuck with an unjust handicap.

"Maybe you shouldn't have smashed it to bits?" Roger had suggested.

B is ten years old, and no, that's not it. He'd done the first thing that had occurred to him. He'd done what was in his nature, and A had done what was in his.

It's that day when he first decides that A is unfairly predisposed towards detective work, and that, contrastingly, he himself has been stuck with the temperament and skill set of one of those famous serial murderers whose last meal makes it into one true crime book or another.

The trouble with learning something like that is you can't unlearn it.

 

\---

 

A's lips stain his fingers a darker red than he expects and when the tears start leaking his stomach starts wobbling and the only thing to do is hit him again. It's been a week since B had decided to become a homicidal maniac, two weeks since A's half birthday, and three since L had left for his case in Kuwait.

The grass rubs dirty green patches into their trousers as they scramble over one another in the yard, A's attempts at escape morphing quickly into weak counterstrikes, and B's experimental violence rolling itself into a quick, jolting, nauseous dance that keeps him moving even once the anger has faded out of him.

Anger at what? A had looked happy. Beaming, even. He'd gotten a letter, had been handed it directly by the postman on his early morning jaunt through the countryside, and B had seen the monogram _L_ even from down the drive. He'd launched himself like a rugby captain, knocking them both to the hard earth. A's grin had dropped quickly, but B had just kept hitting and he doesn't know why.

There's a choked frustration in his voice when he finally manages to speak, pulling himself out from under B and clutching his arm. "Stop it! Stop!"

B keeps him in place, not letting him out of reach, and he straddles him there, breath coming heavy and jaw locking itself with a boiling, all-consuming rage. "You're better than me," he says, when the rushing in his head finally begins to slow.

A's pale brow creases. "No."

B punches him again.

" _No,_ " A insists, putting power behind the word now, face contorting with a puzzled sort of distaste. "Just different."

B stands up then, stumbling back, the bones of his fingers throbbing, his cheeks warm and the backs of his eyes stinging. He turns and runs and doesn't stop running until the groundskeeper catches up with him half an acre away and hauls him back to Roger's office for a disciplinary session.

 

\---

 

He'd nicked the needle from the nurse's, filled it with itchy clear liquid, and stuck it in the cat. He's in the cellar, staring at its limp body and trying to decide how to most gruesomely take it apart, when A comes in.

"What did you do?" he asks, the slatted light from the upstairs painting long stripes between them. Where B would like there to be chilled fear, there is only a dodgy sort of wariness, and he squares his shoulders and hunkers down over his prey in order to display his resolve against it.

"Killed the cat," B says, not looking up.

A squats down next to him, keeping as much off of the rusted floor as he can, sun-browned knees poking out of his shorts and into B's sides. B watches him watch the animal's breath rise and fall, and wants to push him over, bury his head in the grime he so abhors, and do unspeakable things. Unthinkable things. Murder, or something, probably.

It's been twenty six days since B had decided to become a homicidal maniac, but the time in between has so far has consisted of only a number of colorful plans, a few well-organized charts, and the odd watercolor painting of Wammy drowning in his own blood. Nothing very proactive yet.

The cat is step one. Drugging the cat is step one of step one. He'd be on step two by now if A wasn't down here, blundering all over things.

"It's not dead," A says. Bloody genius, isn't he?

Aren't they all? Isn't that the point? B feels sick and he's cold down here and his legs have gone stiff from kneeling for so long and he just wants to go upstairs and drink tea and hide things from the maids - watching them scramble, swearing under their breath all the while so as to keep out of Roger's earshot - but death is not a quick or a clean process, or so L says, anyway, as if he's the authority on it, and B doesn't just _give up_ in the face of adversity.

Or in the spotted, scrunched face of one _Alistair Underhill_ , and accompanying numbers, floating there like some sort of gaudy advertisement. B can't do the math without a pen and paper and a couple of minutes, but he knows well enough by now that this particular configuration means that A won't die for a long while now. Fifty years plus.

He looks back at the cat. It doesn't have numbers. They never do.

He says, "According to the theory of eternal return, the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across unlimited time and space. Which means that everything that will happen has happened and is happening." He blinks down at the small, brown body spread out before them. "I killed the cat," he says. "I just haven't done it yet."

B means this statement to be very impressive, but it seems to float past A as easily as something he's heard a dozen times. He just shrugs it off.

"But eternal return is just a theory, and you're missing breakfast."

"I'm not hungry," B snaps.

"You don't have a weapon," A points out. "How are you going to kill her?"

B knocks him over, hand shoving out before he fully processes the urge, following the script of his jagged fantasy, but stopping there. No beating, no blood, no triumphant destruction. He's sussed out his role nice and clear-cut, but he can't quite get himself to take up the mantle.

He wants A to sit up and shove him back, tit for tat, but he just stays there on the floor, frowning slightly in a haze of airy dust that floats visibly in the spaces where the light hits it. He looks at B and B looks at him and nobody looks at the cat, but they both know it's there and they both know that, whether or not time is circular, it's not dead.

A still doesn't say anything, so B mumbles, "Are there sausages today, at least?" and stands up.

 

\---

 

B is 11 years and 16 days old and he and A are exploring the boarded up church down the lane from Wammy's. A girl called C had arrived yesterday from Cambodia, and as it had been suggested that they get to know her and make her feel welcome, they are hiding out of dodge until that ridiculous notion dries up out of Roger's head.

"This is rude," A is saying, peeking through a thin crack between the planks that cover the window frame. He is always saying things like that. Propriety, he calls it. B calls it insincerity.

He shrugs, leaning on one of the pews. His limbs feel stringy and he is jealous because A is now several inches taller than him. "So what? She'll get used to it." The unsaid, well-heard following sentiment is: _You did_.

"When is L coming back?" A asks, shifting sharply onto another subject, not bothering with the pleasantry of a segue. His manners are as sporadic as his genius, and they both come out in shockingly bright waves, only to recede just as quickly out of sight or sound.

"Shut up," B says, without thinking.

He doesn't want to think about L. When L isn't here, he may as well not exist, and L is never here.

The air is thick and smells like wood rot and A looks over at him for the first time in minutes, like he's just noticed that they are speaking to one another. "Sorry," he says. He knows that B doesn't like to talk about L. There's that propriety again.

A walks with slow steps over to where B sprawls himself like an art piece, sitting down at the pew. After a moment of trying to maintain a rugged emptiness of expression, B rolls his eyes and sits down too, knocking his shoulder into A's as he does it.

A knocks him back, a contrast to his usual reactions, which are a stark mix of pacifism and impotence. They bob like that for a few childish moments, quiet and breathing in dust, the shrill buzz of the cicadas crying outside filtering in through the decaying walls.

Shortly, B says, "Wanna loot the place for valuables?"

A grins his same, slim, throatless grin. "I don't, but I'll watch you."

He thinks that A must just be relieved that B's stopped asking him to stalk 'future victims' with him in town. He stands, throwing a sharper smile back, but lets it fade to a frown as he reads the numbers concertedly. _Alistair Underhill_. That's the same as ever, but the date, the date has changed.

B has gotten better at the math. B has gotten more used to people dying. B is prepared for A to die in the fifty and some years that he is set for, not the four and a rough half that he has apparently been rerooted for.

A blinks back at him, as if to ask what B is staring at without making it a question. If B had any propriety, he would play it off, look away and go quickly about his business, pretending as if nothing has changed.

B does not have any propriety.

 

\---

 

Dates change, sometimes. Not often, but it happens. He doesn't know why, what the differentiating factor is between certain events and others, and there isn't exactly a guidebook to consult on the subject. Encyclopedias and databases and all of the finest handpicked information in the world laid out before him in this place, and B can't find a damn scrap on the only thing he's truly ever been curious about.

"You're avoiding me."

A's got dirty brown patches on his elbows, faded now that the maid had gone a round with his laundry, but still visible. They'd shivered through the crawlspace under the deck a few weeks ago, knocking limbs and muttering curses and looking for the bright gold treasure of discovery, anything to break the pale monotony of lectures and chapters and indifference. At some point B had stopped caring about becoming and started caring about _being_.

Now he barely has the mind to pay to any of that.

He doesn't look at A when he speaks, and doesn't deny it. "So what?"

"So," A says, sitting down next to where B has curled himself under the cavernous overhang of one of the far-removed library shelves, "stop it."

 _Alastair Underhill. 6 2 4 9 6 8 2 1._ That's May 12th, 1997. That's a little over four years. That's too soon.

B stands, plucking up his pen and his paper and the large the copy of _Paradise Lost_ with the smudged typeface and the crinkled cover. There is a hum from the small Sunday storm that rushes the leaves outside around in torrential heaves. The room feels far too large and far too empty and he leaves A alone in it without a glance back.

 

\---

 

B is 11 years and 34 days old and he wakes to find A asleep in his bedside chair. B does not have a bedside chair.

He kicks A and watches him jerk awake. He cycles his mind through the blood spatter patterns of famous murder scenes that they'd reviewed in class yesterday, and does not look at or think about the flecks of dim morning light that filter patterns through A's hair and along his jaw and down his neck.

"Did you drag that in from the study?" he asks as A blinks blearily, stumbling up the stairs of consciousness with heavy steps. He is always very controlled until he is not.

B nods at the chair when A frowns, and waits for the inevitable grunt of assent. It comes out as more of a squeak, and A clears his throat quickly afterwards, sitting up and managing to ignore his embarrassment with admirable distinction.

A stands, after a few moments. B doesn't.

"We're not friends," he says, staring at his bedroom ceiling and deciding what he does and doesn't want.

"Okay," A says.

He cares if A lives or dies, but he doesn't want to care. He is not going to put in any effort to try and save him, but he will withdraw himself from the situation to see if his presence has any effect. It's an experiment. He is an experimenter. He is the cloudless sky. He is the chopping block. Maybe the one that Alistair Underhill will die on.

Before, when their interactions had been limited to trembling resentment and bloodied fists, A had quite clearly had a long life ahead of him. Now he has four years. Coincidence is a strange and sticky thing and B doesn't like to let it worm its way into his neat rows and clever plans. Either he is a factor or he is not a factor. Either he will find out, definitively, or he will not.

Either A will leave the room, or he will stay.

"I think nothing of you," B says, not looking away from the mismatched white patches where the repairman had spackled up the leak last April.

"Okay," A says, and then climbs into the bed.

The springs squelch and B's back locks up and he wants to turn and scrabble away on instinct, but he stays very still and does not care about anything at all, not even a little bit. He does not say, _get out,_ he does not say, _you are pale and weak and will probably die of pneumonia and I want to push your head into the dirt and watch you struggle_. He does not even say, _get away from me or you will die_ , even as it twists and howls in his throat, making his temples pulse with the heady nausea of despair.

"You can see where the leak from last spring was, did you know?" A says, cluelessly, helplessly - B wants to to strangle him with tissue paper, and could - lying on his back and pointing up to the off-color spot on the ceiling.

"Yes," B says, closing his eyes, "I knew."

 

\---

 

His twelfth birthday is spent eating cigarette smoke from the pack he'd nicked from the corner store a block into town. A catches up with him a quarter of an hour later, huffing jog slowing to a casual stroll as he approaches, but B can feel him coming for miles. Acres. Yards. Something like that. Something daunting like a storm.

"You think you're so cool, don't you?" Alistair says to the burnt out _24/7_ sign in the window, stopping next to B on the dirty curb.

Wammy had offered to have a celebration for him back at the orphanage, but B had declined. Somehow, a quiet night with the cliches had struck him as less pathetic than making merry with C through F in the dining hall, forcing smiles and pretending as if he wasn't the start of a very long line of replacements. L is the road to nowhere and the rest of them are just little back alleys and side streets. B is adamant about not being drawn onto the map.

He's a rotten apple, sitting in a tree, kay-eye-el-el-eye-en-gee. If he's going to be a slave, it'll be to his own weakness and no one else's.

He looks at A. The numbers flicker back, red like sun spots and unchanged.

"Don't you?" he says, huffing on his cigarette but not actually inhaling. He's found that it's less disgusting that way, but maintains the aesthetic. He's a twelve year old boy and he shouldn't care about things like _aesthetic_ and _greater purpose_ and the _end of the world_. But he does. It's in him, like a disease. "You wouldn't be out here freezing your ass off with me if you didn't."

A looks at him sideways. "Roger would piss himself to hear you talk like that."

B's eyebrows go up. "I'm pissing myself now to hear you say the word _piss_. Finally making our way out of the 18th century, are we?"

"E has a crush on me," A says very quickly, frowning.

B does not like E. Mousy little girl in braids and freckles and pleats, always books and earl grey and solitude, like an Austen protagonist except without the clever quips. She can't eat dairy or wheat and she talks more to the duck pond than she does anyone else. Real name Ellington Easter and she's far too dull a girl to have such an interesting name. B thinks if he ever writes that book he means to write - after he learns the slaughter and the stars and sits on the throne just to check if it's harsh on his back - he'll steal it, give it to his heroine. Too good a name to waste.

"My condolences," B says, looking away.

Very suddenly, A turns sharply and grabs the cigarette out of his hand. He holds it up like some sort of prize, then slowly his wrist loosens and it drops to the ground. "What's your point with all this, B? I'm frustrated. I understand most things, but I don't understand this."

"You _don't_ understand most things," B snaps back on instinct, wishing he hadn't but unable to stop now he's started. "Just because you can jump through every hoop they hold up for you doesn't mean you know anything about the world. You're just the favored pet, performing tricks. Reading off the lines they've written for you."

"Your metaphor's all mixed," A says, blinking at him.

"Fuck off." B shoves past him, crossing the street, but stopping midway across when he's jerked back by his hood. He feels childish and impotent, hung there like a sacrifice as A pulls him back or follows him over, something so that they're back on the sidewalk, a palm on each of B's cheeks, skin warm against skin like a night fire, lighting up the cool grey evening.

"We're friends," A says. B shakes his head. "We were friends. You were my friend. Why don't you just be my friend again?" He speaks and it swirls into the wind, rushing past B on a rolling tide. _6 2 4 9 6 8 2 1_. He'll die just like this, hands right on him, if B doesn't pry him off.

"No room for friends in a place like this," B snaps, and kicks him in the shin.

A's legs buckle, sickly and weak - a match made in heaven, he and little Miss Easter - and he falls on the sidewalk, grunting breathily. His laugh is a dull blade in the night. "That's more like it," he mumbles, grey eyes grinning up at B.

"Stay away," B calls back, rolling his eyes as he turns back toward the gum-spotted path that leads to the old country road where Wammy's House sits, a relic of the past, looming over the modern city like a stately grandfather.

"Why?" A asks, voice rising to an ungainly pitch to beat the wind.

"Because I said so!" B shouts back, devolving to the level of maturity that his twelve years suggest, and not glancing over his shoulder to check if A is alright.

He is, of course. He'll be just fine. He's got three and some years to go.

 

\---

 

B is 12 years and 261 days old when he finally manages to kill the cat.

The late summer air tastes like petrol and there is sweat on his upper lip. A ten year old boy named G from Nigeria had arrived late last night and Beyond had stood outside of his bedroom door listening to him cry into the bedsheets. The cat had been limping around the halls the way it does, stumbling with drunken disinterest against his legs and squealing like the half-dead little beast that it is.

Animals always like B.

He'd abandoned his vigil and climbed down the west garden trellis, the poor pussy trailing after him, nipping for stray bits of affection. He'd wandered into the woods just to see if it would follow, and that is where he had tickled its chin until it had slowed, purring contentedly, and then snapped its neck. It had broken easily, like opening a clasp. Just a little click.

He almost wants to undo it once its done. As if the only worth of the action had been in the moments leading up to it. It feels empty now.

He leaves it in the woods and climbs the trellis back up in through the loose-latched window, but instead of heading left to his own bedroom, he follows the hall forward, and up the rickety attic steps to where A spends his nights reading C.S. Lewis essays and chalking messy, unelaborate drawings onto his bedroom wall.

The light is off, but he is awake. B can hear the stuttering breath, coming in loose puffs that curl over the curtain of night into the blue tint of morning that rises from the east. Through the crack in the door, he can see the dips and shakes of the bed, A's hands moving against his own flesh like a Greek love poem, or one of those trashy magazines that D always eyes in the petrol station down the road.

He watches the climb with a detachment he doesn't know how to navigate. It is either beautiful or it is not and he doesn't know which. He understands the act, understands hormonal changes and puberty and self-stimulation, but he feels nothing except an overhanging sense of the strange and unknown. He can feel the cat's pulse against his fingers still. He doesn't know what to do with his own body.

A gasps and jerks and stills, then hunkers down further within his covers, and B knows for certain that that is not beautiful. The ridiculousness of the sight - of the spectacle that A has made of himself - lends him a cruel confidence and he suddenly finds himself with a great desire and ability to step forward into the room.

The floorboards creak under his feet.

A shoots up, face a juvenile red, and looks as if he's going to shout - all sense of _propriety_ gone with the daylight - but he stops short, throat spasming visibly, and stares.

"B," he says, leaning forward, pale eyes squinting in the dark. "B, why are you crying?"

 

\---

 

The sun flares up slowly and for such a sickly looking thing, A handles the shovel well. B sits by, trousers dampened by the dewy forest floor, and watches him dig. The cat's body falls with a bony jolt and the hole feels like it takes longer to close than it had to open.

"We should mark it," B says, quiet and unkind, to A's sweating back. "Plant a rose bush or something."

A looks over his shoulder at him, eyes pinched as if he's not sure whether to reestimate B's intelligence or tell him to knock it off with the bad jokes. "No," he murmurs, "it'll be too easily found that way." He begins kicking over loose leaves and brush, mussing the spot so that it looks just like the surrounding area.

B pushes himself up to go and stand over the grave with A, watching his smudged white trainers move through the dirt.

"Maybe I want it to be found," he says.

A's foot stops. He looks at B with basset hound eyes, vaguely uncaring even through the melancholy. "They'll send you away."

"Maybe I want to be sent away," B says.

A punches him in the face.

Or, it's not quiet a punch, palm half open and flapping without any measured strength, but it stings with intent and B stumbles back several steps, catching himself of the mottled bark of an old oak and steadying his steps slowly. He blinks at A for a moment, not quite believing it had happened the way it had, and then he laughs.

"That's my line," he says, spitting out of the side of his mouth like the delinquent he longs so desperately to be, and grinning at A like a loon.

"Stop killing things, B," is all A says to him before plucking up his shovel and heading back towards the house. "You're not even good at it."

_6 2 4 9 6 8 2 1._

_No,_ B thinks, _I rather am._

 

\---

 

It's a month and a half before B manages to get up the nerve to track A down in the library, stand over him, and say, "How does it feel?"

"What?" A asks, looking up casually as if it hasn't been a full lunar cycle since they've had a conversation, finger slipping down automatically to mark the line he's on in _Crime and Punishment_.

"Masturbation," B says, lips shaping the word with a delicious surety, stark and obscene in the echoing bulk of the room. It's empty, of course. B had timed it that way. He'd timed everything. He'd practiced the word in front of the mirror until he could say it with cruel ease.

A's eyes widen slightly, but he gives no other indicator of discomfort, and after a moment, looks back to his book casually, huffing, "Why don't you try it yourself and find out."

B keeps his eyes level on him, back straight like he'd practiced. "I don't want to know how it makes me feel, I want to know how it makes _you_ feel."

The color that rushes into A's face is immensely satisfying, though B is not entirely sure why. He is not adequately certain of what he's even doing here, or why he'd lifted his self-imposed ban on companionship just for a bit of teasing, but it doesn't feel like something so bad. Doesn't feel like something that could kill.

And, either way, A's got more than two years left; there's no need to be treating him as if he's on his death bed, likely to shatter at any moment. B knows the moment. Knows it to the second, and he has seconds and seconds in between to play with his food - if it is his. And why shouldn't it be? He has seen A's death and he has no plans to save him, nevermind that he's not wholly sure that he conceivably could. He's not even trying.

He is guilty of neglect, so he may as well be guilty of murder. He may as well be killing A every moment until _6 2 4 9 6 8 2 1_. Fulfilling his destiny after all.

"I thought you weren't talking to me anymore?" A says after a flustered, rigid moment.

B grins but it feels pale and moveable, a twitch of diseased muscles, and he doesn't want to feel like himself anymore. "I thought you wanted me to talk to you again?"

A stands, _Crime and Punishment_ sliding off his lap and knocking B on the feet with a dull thud, and maybe A should be embarrassed about the mishap, and maybe he is, but any such sentiment is overshadowed by the strange, pulsing pressure of his lips on B's, pressing forward like a bright, warm accusation, an _I know what you'll do next summer_ , and it feels for the moment as if A can feel all of his raging, murderous intent, his loathsome perversion, the things written on the wall in chalky handwriting. The clock face smashed to bits.

It is in A's nature to kiss timidly, and in B's to grab him by the hair and jerk him around by it, laughing and humming and singing his way down - but he does not.

He wants to be the jester, the one with the blood on his hands, and the ability to wipe that blood all around, getting it on everything - but he, he can't move. He freezes against A's touch, a thin, nighttime mannequin, only shifting slightly to meet A's soft, breathy presses. To allow them. Fold open and accept them.

This is not part of his destiny at all.

"Soiled," A says, after the drawn out, dissipating warmth of him pulling away. "It makes me feel soiled."

It takes B a moment to realize what he's talking about, remember the question that he'd asked, eyebrow cocked and voice level, all the trappings of surety doled out to hide whatever it is that had been scurrying around underneath. He feels it now, so much closer to the skin.

He turns around, kicks over a small reading table, and stomps out of the library. He doesn't want to play with his food if it means his food plays with him.

 

\---

 

B has only barely turned 13 when he finds A sobbing in the courtyard.

No one else is about and the midday sun is a glaring spotlight on his fair hair and spotty, red face. B does not know what to do, so he stands there, arm halfway to outstretched, for a full minute or two before dropping it and simply watching him. Fat, full-bodied tears roll down his cheeks at a fever pace, body wracked, throat heaving dry. He looks like he is about to die then and there and if B didn't know better he might be afraid.

He might be afraid anyway.

"What's the matter?" B asks in a voice that one might use to say, _'I don't care about you at all,'_ during an interval when the sobs have quieted to simple messy tears.

A looks at him from behind the curtain of misery that seems to be suffocating him, and if there is shame there, it's so far overtaken by abject pain so as not to even register on any notable scale. He barks up another sob, wrapping his hands around his knees and burying his head between the knobby bones there.

B sits down next to him on the bench, unsure of what to do or say or why he's even sticking around to try and figure it out, and frowns at the crinkling sound of paper. He shifts slightly and picks up the neatly folded letter next to A, its color nearly blending it in with the bench.

The moment B realizes who it's from, his pulse goes heavy and thudding and he spends several seconds utterly terrified of anything L could say that could have this effect on A. Reading through it, however, he finds it to be nothing but a letter of commendation, and not a very notable one at that. Just a few perfunctory lines about how well A is doing, how L is confident that he will make a thoroughly competent successor, and that he may be coming to visit in the next six months or so. That's all. It's not very different from any of the letters that the children sometimes get, aside from being slightly more congratulatory.

A should be proud. A does not look proud. A is getting snot all over his shirt sleeves, wiping at his face and shuddering.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" B snaps.

"I don't know," A tells him, weakly, between guttural noises, and B doesn't know what to say to that.

 

\---

 

A sleeps in B's bed that evening, and well on into the night. He wakes up some time before three - while B is sitting cross-legged beside him, pouring resolutely over the night's assignment with what he hopes is disdain intense enough to reach Roger in the opposite wing - and says, "I don't want to live in the world."

B looks over at him and something in him yearns to whisper, _I'm sorry_ , because no matter how confused he is by whatever it is that's going on with A, he somehow feels like it's his fault.

Instead, he just murmurs, "Give it time," and goes back to his work.

It's half past five when A rolls over, wraps himself around B's side, leg hooking over his calve softly, and B freezes, breath caught in him and suddenly utterly inextricable. He doesn't shove him off, though. Maybe that's as good of an apology as he can manage.

 

\---

 

They're in one of the airy, pale green forests of the English countryside and B is climbing a tree and glancing over his shoulder every once in a while at where A watches from the ground. He is 13 years and 63 days old.

"Sometimes I hate everything," A says, watching him with keen distance, and mild appreciation. While A may be the winning candidate when it comes to intellectual pursuits - if only by a thin margin and propensity for the neat and orderly - B is far more predisposed to the physical, sensory side of things.

"Welcome to the club," B huffs down. "Would you like a special sticker or something? Jesus." His hands struggle over the branches as they thin out and it becomes hard to find solid holds. A twig snaps off and falls to the ground, only barely missing the top of A's head, who stands stock still and doesn't react at all.

He watches B's continuing climb and says, "I'm luckier than most people, aren't I? I'm the chosen one. I'm the golden boy."

"Stop that," B calls down derisively, "your sea of troubles is sending me into a fit of despair. I can't take it anymore."

He really has no patience for A throwing himself a pity party, not when he's got what all of them want and doesn't seem to appreciate it in the least. B kind of wants to throw himself out of the tree just to make him quit whining.

"I want to kiss you again," A says, casually, like it's nothing. B's hands slip on their support, legs locking up, and in a moment he's falling, hitting a few branches on the way down, but even broken the impact with the ground rattles his whole body.

He's not sure if he's hit his head. The world seems to split into quaking lines, twirling about him, and his bones feel aligned all wrong. He groans, and glares up at A.

"Fucker," he says.

A's kneeling down beside him, studiously checking for injuries the way they'd been taught to since early childhood. After running his hands along B's skin in very unseemly places, he rolls his eyes, posture relaxing. "You're fine."

The notion is equal parts comforting and disappointing - because it would have been a nice thing to hold over A - but B becomes unable to process either emotion as he lays his head back against the cool dirt and pulls A forward by the face, kissing him hard and sloppy, just to be the one to do it first. It feels nicer than he means it to, and he struggles with maintaining his body's disinterest as A climbs onto him.

"Sometime I don't hate everything," A breathes against his lips, kissing him again.

B wants to shove him off, but can't manage to make his body do it. _I cannot save you,_ he thinks, but a tiny, rebellious part of him wishes that he could.

 

\---

 

They're 14 when A is diagnosed with clinical depression.

The doctors come up and down the stairs in their expensive leather shoes and he's confined to his bedroom for more than a week. No one who is lettered C through J acknowledges that there are now locks on the nurse's medicine cabinets, but after five days of trembling, uncaring - he doesn't care, _he doesn't care_ \- silence, B clears his throat very loudly in the breakfast hall after finishing his oatmeal, and says, "So, how about A's suicide attempt, huh?"

He sees E wiping furiously at her puffy eyes in the hallway afterwards, as he's being dragged off to Roger's office.

"Who told you?" he's asked, after being planted in the stiff-backed chair that he's become endlessly familiar with in his time at Wammy's.

Roger looks older than he usually does, veins blue and prominent, face red and bilious, a measured criss-cross of stress and failing health. He looks at B with his clear, watery eyes, an imploring old fool in headmaster's garb, and B feels something like sorry for being here, for being a thing that's killing this old man day by day.

He takes pity and breathes out, rolling his eyes. "No one told me," he mumbles. "Genius IQ, remember? What you should really be asking is why the rest of them have been sitting round twiddling their thumbs while A's dying up there."

"He's not… " Roger removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose, as if maybe taking B out of focus will make him disappear altogether. "He's being rehabilitated. He'll be just fine."

"Okay," B says, without any hint of acquiescence. He doesn't believe a word of it and they both know it.

After a long moment of withering midmorning silence, Roger nods his dismissal, though as B is slumping out of the room, he calls after him, "However, if he doesn't recover adequately, you are next in line. Please do keep that in mind."

B freezes where he in the doorframe. "My test scores," he begins, almost upset, though he doesn't know why. That's what he's always wanted to hear, isn't it?

"Test scores aren't everything," Roger says.

Out in the hall, B stands perfectly still for several moments, trying to fit this idea into the world that he has crafted in the last few years. He is the villain. He is the man in the mask. He is the end of the world. He is not L. He hates L. He _hates_ L.

He could never be good enough for L.

But it's set in stone, isn't it? The story is already written. A dies and B… takes the spoils? Carries on the legacy? What is that? Why does he want it, why does it fill him up with something he has not ever felt? It doesn't matter how he feels, though. This is what's going to happen. It has been happening for years. A will die and B can't do a thing about it - doesn't want to, why would he want to? - and so he might as well take what he can get from it. 

Right?

He glares at at Ellington Easter on the way to his room, hoping it'll make her cry more.

 

\---

 

It's days later before they finally let him up to see A, and when they do, he swaggers into the room first thing in the morning and dumps a bunch of odds and ends on his lap, waking him with a start.

"Brought you books," he says, bustling around, not making eye contact, "assigned ones and then some that just looked like the kitschy sort of over-the-rainbow shit you like. And a walkman I stole off of someone in the library. Not sure who. And this." He sets the bowlful of Jello down on the side-table, wrinkling his nose as it jiggles. "So," he continues, voice clear and echoing in the wide attic room, as he kicks a mess of clothes off a chair and sits down in it, "what's it like to be depressed?"

A looks at him, and there's a queerly shy expression flickering there - mixed in with the sleepy confusion - as if he's embarrassed of wanting to off himself. He shrugs lazily. "Not much different than it always is."

"They put you on drugs?" B asks, not pausing between answer and question. He feels like an interrogator. He feels strange.

A shakes his head. "No. They said I'm too young to prescribe to safely, and that they should wait until I'm older and more fully developed." He stares at the ceiling. "Fuckers."

B's eyebrows go up. He's not sure he's ever heard A say that word before. "Misery has made you crass," he says.

"Misery has made me everything that I am." A stares up at the ceiling, like there's something there looking back at him. B feels a muscle in his jaw twitch.

"Poetic," he says, with an eye roll. "Now get over yourself." A's eyes jerk back to him and that one movement is immensely satisfying. "Maybe you've got something messed up in your head, but okay, guess what? We all do. I could tell you some shit I've seen and felt that could turn your pink little cheeks white. Little E has been crying for days - because of you, I might add - and we all know H was sexually abused before she came here. It's shit. You've been dealt a shit lot, but so has everyone else, and you don't get to call quits if the rest of us don't, alright? _Alright?_ "

He's breathing heavier than he means to. He's feeling more than he has ever meant to.

A smiles at him and it cuts shards in his chest, making it hard to swallow. He says, "I've missed you."

"Of course you have," B says, and grins back, wide and cheeky, and tries to calm his breathing down. He doesn't care if A dies, he can't care, but - but maybe, just maybe, he can make the numbers change back.

Staying away hadn't helped, though. He's not going to stay away anymore.

 

\---

 

They make-out in the church, with the dust and the grime and the colonies of ants that march in neat lines all across the ground. B is pretty sure there is a family of squirrels living in the rafters. He is 14 years and 208 days old. He is too young to feel the things he does.

Hands wandering, lips chapped, laughing against each other's hair; there is a weightlessness and a thrum, something whirring around and making parts of him sing, parts that hadn't even had voices before. This is all wrong, and the numbers haven't changed, but he feels A's mouth against his, moving like a swallowing thing, asking for everything - and he would give it.

He would give far too much for things to stay like this and never change. A is smiling against his flesh, grabbing with an open, lively ecstasy, and if every moment was like this, he would never have to leave.

B closes his eyes so he can't see the numbers and presses against him. Maybe, if he keeps doing this, he won't.

 

\---

 

B is 14 years and 293 days old and A is sobbing into his sweater, fingers clasped into the material like claws, body racked with sobs. "I don't want it, I don't want it, I don't want it," he saying, in a mottled, hushed voice. "I don't want it."

"Fuck it," B whispers into his hair, because he doesn't know what he's doing or why, and he is scrambling for some way to put things back together. "Fuck it, don't take it. You don't have to have it. Have something else. You can have whatever you want. The world is made up of far more than this shithole we're stuck in. We can leave, you and me. A, A, Alastair, look at me, we can go. We can go, okay?"

A keeps crying and by the time that night is fading into grey morning, the tears have dried on B's skin and things have gone silent and they are both lying there, wrapped around each other like a couple of doomed saps, breathing even breaths and trying not to be part of the world.

B thinks that A has already fallen asleep by the time he glances up, pale eyelashes glinting in the early light, and says, "How did you find out my name?"

He freezes, not knowing how to answer that, not having even realized he'd let it slip at the time. There is so much that A doesn't know, so much more to the story that he doesn't understand, and maybe if he did it'd change things, make him live, or live longer. But B doesn't know how to say any of it.

So he just says, "Go to sleep," instead.

And A is so exhausted that, for once, he listens.

 

\---

 

It's a two weeks after A's birthday that they're sitting in the courtyard, pouring over books in the cool sun of springtime, when he looks up at B and says, "You're next in line, aren't you?"

B blinks at him, knows exactly what he's talking about, and doesn't want to answer the question but doesn't want to stay silent, either. He'd stayed silent for years. The numbers are coming closer. They're so close A might as well be dead in this moment and B is watching his corpse underline a passage in _The Honorable Schoolboy_ , and chew on the end of his pen.

"So what?" is all he says in response, shrugging off the implications, even as they grapple to his skin, making it tingle with the pain of loss.

"So," A says, smiling his grey-eyed smile that laughs at the world, that sobs in its arms and calls its bluff and tears everything apart, "don't fuck it up."

B is torn. He says, "I will fuck it up," and A kisses him because time is short and that's all there is left to do.

 

\---

 

Three weeks later, B doesn't want to get out of bed, but he does. He stands and he gets dressed and he brushes his teeth and he makes himself a cup of tea in the deserted kitchen. He sits and waits and listens to the clock tick itself forwards with every slow second. He should have been there hours ago, he should have been holding his hand while it happened, but he could not bear to look.

And besides, it was always going to happen, somehow or another, whether B was there or not. At least if he stays away, there's no way he can get the blood on his hands. He is the villain. He is the killer, but this is a kill he doesn't want. The cat is probably turning in its grave.

The one they'd dug on a morning like this.

The attic stairs creak as he takes them slowly, and the door handle slips out of his grasp once, twice, before he gets a good grip and opens it up. The room is silent, and A is floating there like a ghost.

No, not floating. Hanging.

B stands there and he's not sure for how long, but the sun comes up at some point, and it casts a golden glowing light around A's body, like a fucking halo. Like heaven shining down. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous.

It really is just like the time he'd killed the cat, except this time A is not alive to ask, _"B, why are you crying?"_

 

\---

 

"L is coming to visit," Roger says, voice more tired and frail than it has ever been before, and only likely to become tireder and frailer. "For the funeral. He'll want to speak to you, though, I expect. Familiarize you with what the process is going to be. How you're going start training, and of course, getting used to your new role. It's all things that - that A did, so I'm sure you'll have no trouble with it. You're a bright boy, B, you really, truly are. And, despite the troubles that we've had and will no doubt have in future, I truly believe that you can be a great benefit to this world, if you set your mind to it. Do you understand? B?"

He looks up at Roger and he understands exactly what he is saying. Genius IQ, after all.

B gives a small, careless grin - one he'd stolen from Alistair Underhill - and says, "Blow me."

 

\---

 

Little Ellington Easter is crying again.

B passes her in the hall on the way up to the attic room, and can hear her terrified screams from below once he pours the gasoline, lights the match, and sets the whole place on fire.

 

\---

end.


End file.
